2. What sort of system do you have to address problems with the unconditional hierarchy? For example, if an employee disagrees with Gabe, who wins and how is that handled?
UPDATE: addition to question #1
I don't know about you, but not doing anything is boring to me. Working is so often much more fun than doing nothing.
Real management isn't telling people what to do. It's helping people find the intersection between what they want to do and what customers need, and then supporting them.
That strikes me as especially easy at Valve, where the whole point is to create something that other people enjoy. If you can't find fun somewhere in the vast space of "create something fun," you're dead inside.
1. How do you handle jobs that suck, but must be done.
Like backups ... nobody really likes the job of 'backup guy'.
It's boring. Tedious. A backwater of a role with no meaningful career progression. Also - the software typically sucks, and is expensive. Also - the hardware typically sucks, and is super-expensive.
But someone must pay attention to backups because stuff happens and you might actually need to recover everything from tape to get the company online.
How does Valve get the tedious, boring, nit-picky, utterly necessary stuff done?
We experimented with out-sourcing a few years ago. It was a disaster: the out-sourcing company was 'fair-to-excellent' with standard products and services.
But we're a manufacturing company. The majority of our software is specific to our industry. Suddenly the vendor is dealing with dozens of apps they've never even heard of. And - whoops - some of the guys who dealt with that stuff are laid off.
The rest of us got calls from confused techs in Austin plaintively asking what in the heck was the UmptyFratz service and who can restart it?
Long way of saying that - I imagine - some of what Valve does is industry specific and hard to out-source.